The Liminal People (13 page)

“You say your name is Taggert.” I nod. “My mum says she only ever told one person what she could do with her powers. What—”

“She could set fires. Put them out, too. I accidentally lit some curtains in a cabin when we first knew each other, and she put them out. That's how—”

“OK. You're him. What now?”

The girl's got power. We leave the room and no one sees us. She won't let them. I'm stumbling a little, looking like a drunk, but no one is noticing the barrel-chested swarthy guy with glass in his hair or the toilet-smelling ninja as we walk by. At first I thought it was the alarms distracting them, but I spot-check the cornea of one of the people running by us to get to the stairs, and we're not even a blip on his visual cortex. Firemen and cops run past us, baffled by the reports from their comrades already in my old suite. They want to know how a window wall can be blown out without a hint of fire damage or evidence of explosives. At least they think they want to know.

Outside, thoroughly confused Britons gawk at the sky, and the little girl in all black keeps her mental miasma up. I see one or two people trying to stare at us, but only for a second. I don't know what they see, and neither do they. But somewhere in their minds, Tamara gets them to decide it's not worth remembering or focusing on. The contents of a hotel room from thirty stories above make much more interesting observation. I take an extra second to scan for wounded and find none. Good. I take Tamara's hand and let her guide me.

I'm thinking we're going for a car. Either hers, or a stolen one, or even a taxi. Instead she angles for the Underground, which makes no sense because the damn thing is closed. But she's moving with purpose, and I'm not in the mood to argue. I can barely keep my eyes open I'm so tired and hungry. In the station she hops down quickly onto the tracks and starts jogging. I adjust my eyes to the lack of light and follow quickly behind her. Ten minutes of sharp turns and descents down elevator shafts and we end up in what used to be a tube stop—the type often forgotten by maps and city dwellers alike. It's cemented up. The girl stands back, breathes deep like she's about to do some heavy lifting, then pushes a five-by-three section of cement straight back. She doesn't glow, doesn't hum, but I feel the explosion in her mind that only our kind can produce. The only sounds are a slight grunting from her and the giving of the ground beneath her feet as some invisible power pushes her backward slightly. Throughout our night jog I've paid attention to the rats, which seemed to care nothing for us or the empty trains that roar above, behind, and to the sides of us. But all creatures back away from Tamara as she uses her power. She's strong. But she's also tired. I almost don't make it to her side to catch her when she falls from exhaustion. I smell rosewater in her hair as I gather her up in my arms, gently. A perfect square of orange light heralds us into the station.

Inside, the old station is clean and dry. More than that, it looks like a kid's room. There's a stereo, a laptop, running water, even a bathtub. The pictures on the wall—the crown prince and other pop stars—don't match with the girl I'm holding in my arms, but what do I know about interior design and teenagers? Tamara's fighting for consciousness. I give her body the cue to sleep, and it thanks me. There's a huge futon, unmade, in the center of the station. I take off her shoes. I put her in the futon and tuck her in. I unwrap her hair from the yard-long black cloth that's been holding it hostage since our fight. That deep eggplant red/black combination puts me in mind of her mother, especially with the rosewater. She looks like the kid pictures I've seen of Yasmine.

I go over to the mini fridge. Sodas and water. I drink three of both, then sit on the pavement at the foot of the futon. In my pocket, the razor letter. Why not? Nothing else can shock me today. I tear it open with my fingers. Just an address. In Cheswick.

There's a twinkle in my mind, a foreign storm in my port, and I'm awake. I know where I am, who I am, and how I got here—just not how I fell asleep. So I don't lash out. And as soon as I'm fully awake, the alien storm has an eye. Tamara is standing over me, hands on her hips, shoulder-length black/red hair pulled to one side. Her face wears the battle scars of shock and exhaustion poorly. She's got creases where her cheekbones, jaw, and eye sockets should be smooth. I try not to take pity on her.

“So, you fly?” she's demanding.

“No. I jumped. How'd you find this place?” I stand and do the stretches I know will kick my natural body chemistry into gear. I pay attention to the pains and aches in my body the way mechanics pay attention to the pings and vibrations in their cars. Every pain, or lack thereof, tells me something. By the stiffness in my legs I can tell I've been asleep for at least three hours.

“Friend. Former friend, she used to squat here. I saw it when she wasn't looking and took it over when she left. What do you do?” She's trying to sound more London than she is. Either that or the posh schoolgirl enunciation of Yasmine's was a lie.

“I heal. What kind of friend?”

“The kind I'm going to kill the next time I see.” I stop stretching and take a deep look in her eyes. She wants to mean it. She wants to be that hardcore, but she's not.

“The one who lived here, that the one that made the car explode?”

“No. Explain the healing thing.”

“Answer my question first.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm older and smarter than you, and I don't want you getting the idea that we're equals.” She clears the distance between us in under a second.

“Get it straight, old man. I talked to the girls at school—who said you looked different than you do now, by the way. I caught you meeting up with mum at the club. I tracked you down. I snuck into your room, I gave you the impromptu flying lesson, and you're hiding in my spot. So, yeah, we're not equals. I'm better than you.”

“Put down whatever it is you're smoking, child, and start thinking. You tracked me down? I was hired to find you. If you couldn't find me, then I wouldn't have been doing my job. Trust, I don't want to be found, I won't be. I'll give you credit for getting the drop on me, but all you did with that advantage was give me time to strike back. If I hadn't put together who you were, your face would still be in that toilet bowl. You're powerful, but you obviously have little training and even less skill. Save your attitude for the norms, because you're just not that impressive to me.” She's so confused by the calm I'm exuding, the calm I'm making her feel, that she has to break the closeness she established. She searches the fridge before speaking again. I'm sitting on the corner of her bed.

“Drink up the whole icebox why don't you?”

“Side effect of my power, I'm afraid. I get thirsty and hungry often. Now, who lived here before you?”

“Her name is Prentis,” she says after she realizes I won't let the subject go. “She can talk to animals. Rats and dogs mostly . . .”

“We've met.”

“Alia sent her after you, did she?” She says that name with all the venom in her throat. Alia.

“This Prentis works for Alia?”

“More like Prentis is her dog. Prentis was on the street most of her life. Living with her pets like she was one of them. Years before I ever linked up with her, Alia found her. I don't know the right word for what she did to her. . . .”

“Does it involve powers?”

“No. I mean maybe, but I don't think so. What do you call it when one person crushes another's will solely by influence?”

“Slavery?” I'm asking.

“Then it's like Prentis is her slave, but Alia never laid a glove on her, so I don't know . . .”

“Who is this Alia?”

“She's the reason I'm hiding out in Prentis's old squat. You want the guy who blew up the car . . .” She's pausing, breathing deep to control her tears. When she speaks again there's a slight quiver in her voice. “I want Alia. She's the boss.”

“You know who took out the car?”

“His name's Rajesh. He's Alia's muscle. He would've been my first suspect if not for you showing up and tailing Mum . . .”

“And they're all like us?”

“I'm nothing like—”

“What I mean is, they all have powers, right?” She nods her head. “Tell me what you know about them. Tell me everything.”

She sits down on her bed before she starts. Tamara may be slumming it, but she crosses her legs and has diction that is to the manor born when necessary. Still, as I look at her, I'm hard-pressed to find Fish'n'Chips. Yasmine is written in her deep olive skin, oval face, and dark red hair. She is my former lover's child through and through. Her mother used to adopt the same posture whenever she had serious information to give, poised and legs crossed, but relaxed.

To steady her nerves, or to make the point that she's grown, Tamara fishes a pack of smokes out of somewhere and lights one without offering me anything but her suspicion.

“Prentis was like a known street kid, yeah? She never talked about parents or home, yaw know? Everybody knew her but she's what, maybe a year younger than me? So when she wanted to hang, I just accepted it. She was like this instant street cred, yeah? This is beginning of last form, last year. I didn't know she could do the thing with the animals. I just thought she was just good with dogs and stuff, see? Like she'd talk to them and they'd do what she said. It was just a thing.

“I kept her away from Mom and Dad. I knew, I fucking knew they wouldn't approve of her. She's sweet, least I thought she was, but she was always dirty. Not in her head, yeah? Like physically. Maybe from living down here, don't know. Guess that wasn't really the issue. It was more that she was always scared. I didn't think of her as anything more than a cool accessory-type friend. I should feel bad about it, but . . .

“'Bout three weeks after we start hanging out, I start getting these headaches, yeah? I'm catching echoes from sounds that aren't really there. I'm getting nosebleeds that only are relieved when I focus on something. So I'm concentrating more on not blinking than on my iPhone, and what happens? Thing goes flying across the room. The iPhone, I'm saying. I do it again to prove I'm not crazy, then take it down to Prentis, yeah? Figured she's street level, knows things. So I show her the trick. And then she shows me hers. Says there's someone who knows a lot more about this stuff than she does . . .”

“Alia.” I fill in the blank.

“Purebred cunt.” She almost spits. “Didn't think so at the time, you know. She looked cool, profiled like a retired movie star at age sixteen. Like she knew everything. Ran an underground club, too. Every other Tuesday and Friday. Bender, it's called. It's someplace new every time, right? Sometimes abandoned cinemas, sometimes posh houses. Doesn't matter. It's always packed. Always the dopest scenesters. I didn't really believe Prentis when she said she knew Alia. I'd heard of Bender, and Prentis
was
cool but just seemed under the radar. But sure enough, she walked me right into this warehouse over in Dagenham and introduced us all proper like. Alia said she was from Brighton, moved up a couple of years ago, but even then I could tell something was off. . . .”

“What can she do?”

“She's everything you don't see.” The girl said it like it was supposed to shock me. “Me, I can do the thing I did to get us out of your hotel. I can blend in to the background of what people are thinking, yeah? They can look right at me but not see me, if I want. If I focus hard I can do what I did to you in the bathroom, like just pull up everything in a person's head, all the muck and mire of it. More often than not I just catch strong stray thoughts from folks. Alia, she's a surgeon in the mind. She crafts images complete with emotion, texture, all of it. She can make you feel, see, taste, touch, or hear anything she wants you to. Truth is, I don't really know what she looks like. She's always looking like someone new.”

“So how did you hang out with her?”

“Shit, like I wanted to? I was more down for Prentis. Felt bad for her, you know?”

“Why?”

“At the time she hadn't been responsible for any badness, yeah? Plus, I don't know, the way Alia talked about her, to her, made me feel more like the girl was her dog than anything.”

“What did Alia want from you?”

“Wanted me to tell her everything about my thing, you know? She got off on seeing it. Kept asking me how I felt when I used it. If I believed in God, the devil, all the typical overdramatic teenage shit. I would've marked her as mad if it hadn't been for the Bender parties.”

“How's that?”

“Well, yeah, she was nutty around me, but everyone kept talking about how cool Bender was and how everyone wanted to be close to Alia and all that. Here I was trying to gain distance from her—”

“Yeah, but why? I don't know teenage-girl talk, so when you say she was nutty around you, I don't really know what that means.” She thinks for a while, considering her words for the first time. Her guard is down, and I'm seeing a little beauty that's going to turn into a great one in time, if the tragedy of her parent's death, or possibly her own, doesn't overwhelm her.

“It's like she wanted to go lesbian with me but just kiss,” she says after a few moments of silence. “Had a girl in school not too long ago like that. Not my thing. Not against it, but the girl kept following me, telling me how special I was. Realizing now it might be part of my power, yeah? But back then it was right nutter. Alia never tried to make a move, but she's—like blacks say in America—‘all in my grill.'”